The last few days a new boot system called
systemd
has been
introduced
to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
upstart, and might prove to be
a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
based boot system. Tollef is
in the process of getting
systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
at the moment do not.

Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
way forward.

In the mean time, based on the
input
on debian-devel@ regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
with parallel booting enabled by default.